Angry, Too

Normally, I hate "me, too" posts, but Emma at Late Night Thoughts has one that I've just gotta pile on.

The anger has outgrown the misdeeds of the administration, and the greed of big corporations, and the vacuousness of the media, and even the intransigence of people who would rather die than compromise. I'm angry in bigger yet more personal ways. I have a subterranean river of rage that bursts out in great galaxy-sized eruptions that cannot be aimed at anything concrete, so they burrow inwards and cry havoc in my sleep and destroy my peace of mind.

Yah, Emma, they get to me too.

Fundies

The whole Fundie business -- antiabortion, creationism, school prayer, "faith-based initiatives", Puritanism -- has been a particular peeve of mine since I got thrown out of the Baptist Church, 'way back when. (Yeah, I know. Nobody's got a trademark on the name "Baptist". However, all the other Baptist churches I've dealt with since then have had the same, uhh, quirks, that ran me out.)

Fundies (technically, fundamentalist-literalist Protestant Christians) were bad enough back in the 1960s and 1970s, when all they did was harass school boards over biology texts and write nasty letters about "immorality" (My favorite was a campaign that forced Sears to recall a whole bunch of catalogs because one of the models for maternity wear wasn't wearing a wedding ring. No, they don't have a life. At least, not one of their own.) Unfortunately, they've taken over the Republican Party. This was not some secret backroom coup -- they did it the hard way, by being there to do all the scutwork connected with electioneering, over a period of maybe twenty years. After doing this much work, they feel that they deserve some payback. At last, they're getting it. Look at the judges that the Bush administration is nominating, for example.

The really scary ones are the ones that think that they are doing God's Work by destroying the environment and working to promote global war to "Promote God's Plan for the End Times". Yo! Listen up! God doesn't need your help. Your part is to follow the rules -- you know, work for peace and justice, don't kill people, be a good steward of the environment.

Many years ago, when a young man was looking for a fight, he would put a chip of wood on his shoulder and dare anybody to knock it off. If somebody knocked it off, this was an acceptance of the challenge and fisticuffs ensued. I tend to think that the Fundie "beliefs" are in the same category. I have a hard time believing that anybody with any knowledge of how the workd works really believes that crap. "I say that the world was created in six days, and I'm gonna make you respect my "belief", even though I don't believe it myself".

A Fundie is a person who is trying to buy his way into Heaven with other peoples' souls.

Corporatism

The economy is in horrible shape translation: I'm out of work and the reason isn't hard to see. Investor and consumer confidence just isn't there. People aren't spending money, so people who make Stuff have to lay off staff. The laid off workers don't buy stuff. Other people get nervous about their own jobs and save their money instead of buying . There's plenty of money available -- Alan Greenspan is practically giving away toasters at the Fed. So why the vote of No Confidence? It's not just the Internet Bubble, although that was the trigger.

Let's look at some problems:

• Bankruptcies triggered by massive management fraud and accounting trickery
• Officers and directors making astronomical amounts of money, often in companies that are losing money or just plain falling apart.
• Massive "downsizing", requiring the remaining workers to put in much longer hours
• Massive "outsourcing" of major parts of the company overseas

Corporations aren't supposed to work this way. Why should Joe Investor trust his money to a company that is paying more in executive bonuses than they are making in profit, whose accounting is questionable, and who is working their employees like slaves? As to outsourcing, as we saw in the 1960s and 1970s with home electronics, when you outsource all of your manufacturing, it's only a short time before your company is simply the marketing arm of a manufacturing company in Taiwan or wherever. You're not making policy any more.

Basically, it's a tight little game where the insiders make all the money and the suckers take all the risks. And it's tightly tied to

Government

The Republican Party's core constituents are Fundies and big corporations, and this shows in its priorities. Basically, anything a big corporate donor wants, it gets. Eliminate the forty-hour week? OK. Gutting environmental regulations? Cool. School vouchers? Groovy. Faith-based charities? Great as long as the dough only goes to Good Christians(tm).

There are negative results, too. Since the Republicans took over the House and Senate in 1994, it's been Payback Time. Bush & Co have brought this to new heights (Username/password = laexaminer)

My take on politics is that it should be like chromosomes in cell division -- for elections, everybody divides up into two parties; at all other times, everybody works together on the Government's business. Unfortunately, the Republican ambition is to reduce the US to a single-party system. And we know just exactly how well that works elsewhere in the world, right?

Then, there are our shiny new audit-proof, recount-proof computerized voting machines. Brrr.

Insult to Injury

There's no escape from this crap. I seem to be developing a sensitivity to alcohol; I can't even get drunk.

Crocodile Tears

I'm getting really sick of this. InstaPundit just put up yet another in his endless series of posts, to the effect of "It was OK for Bush to lie about Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction because we needed an excuse to invade Iraq because Saddam is Not A Nice Man".

No.

Right wingers don't care squat about Human Rights. Never have, don't now. All you ever hear from the right of center is the occasional mild disapproval of Castro or Palestinian suicide bombers. Never a peep about China. Mention Guatemala and they look at you like you're crazy. Mention what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians and you'll get an explanation of Why They Deserve It. Burma? A bit disturbing, but no worse. Zimbabwe? You can get some heat here, because a lot of the violence is black-on-white –- maximum scare factor for right wingers. Only in the furthest-out fringe of the nut groups do you see explicit calls for "recolonilaization" of "countries incapable of self-rule". (This is what we would need to do if we put in an explicit policy of Fixing Everything around the world.) Tut-tutting doesn't count for anything.

The only time a right winger will ever even mention human rights is when denouncing a country/dictator who is already on the shit list. Iraq is the current obvious example; Cuba and Nicaragua were others.

Hell, right wingers don't care about human rights in this country. After all, they're only immigrants or blacks or people in prison -- not like anybody we know. Nobody who matters, certainly.

Yo! Right Wingers! Listen up! During the whole runup to the invasion of Iraq, every anti-war blogger had to start every post with a disclaimer, to the effect that, yes, Saddam is Not A Nice Man. It's turnabout time. From now on, every time you say "It was OK because Saddam was Not Nice", I want to see a similar disclaimer on why you don't want to see an invasion of Burma, Uzbekistan, Belarus, or any of the other human-rights pestholes around the world. You might also throw in an explanation about why it's OK to do business with China -- after all, it's a Communist country with a government that killed probably more people than any other government in history.

Every time, remember. And with at least as much heat as you use in denouncing France.

As an aside, I'm really surprised to see this attitude from Insty. He is, after all, a law professor. I'm sure he would be the first one up in arms if the Government put in a policy of convicting Bad Guys on faked evidence.

Investing While Democrat

Nice little tidbit on the Martha Stewart indictment here. Turns out that she's a major Democratic campaign contributor.

Explains why the SEC is suddenly so hot and bothered to throw her in jail for such a small infraction ($45,000, if I remember correctly). With "biggies" like Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling (Enron) and Bernie Ebbers (WorldCom) still running around free, it's surprising that they want to spend the effort. Yeah, Martha's a jerk, but so are most billionaires. Comes with the territory. If being a jerk were a crime, we'd all be in big trouble at one time or another.

Looks like we have a new version of DWB ("Driving While Black"). The Supreme Court held recently that cops can make traffic stops based on race anytime they want, as long as the driver has committed a "real" traffic violation. Now, the SEC can go after Democrats at will, as long as they've committed a "real" crime. Problem is that the offences that the SEC is concerned with are things like "insider trading", which is sort of the stock market version of obscenity. ("I know it when I see it.") They didn't even get Martha on this; they went for "obstruction of justice" (ie, she really ticked off the investigators.)

So what do we call this? "Investing While Democrat"? Awkward.

How long before the charge is "donating money to a terrorist organization"?

(Via Charles Dodgson)

LATER -- Turns out that the "fraud" that she committed was simply declaring her innocence. This isn't "Orwellian" any more -- it's a witch hunt. "If she floats, she's a witch. If she sinks, she's innocent." (via Hesoid)

Somebody Gets It

At last.

New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt introduced a bill to require that new voting machines produce an auditable, recountable paper trail.

You'd think that this would be wildly noncontroversial. You'd be wrong. The folks making the "recount-proof" voting machines have very strong political connections. Republican connections. "Trust us" they say. "We have Procedures In Place to make sure that Nothing Can Go Wrong". What are they? "Sorry. Proprietary Information". Anybody who has had a six-month battle with a credit card company over a bogus charge (like I have) won't buy the "The computer can't be wrong" shuck-and-jive.

My thoughts on the subject are here. Important Websites are Sanford Professor David Dill's and Rebecca Mercuri's

(via Atrios)

Copycat

Kinky Friedman's response to the Dixie Chicks.

WARNING: Do not click immediately after eating. Not suitable for children or invalids. Cover all fishbowls. May be hazardous to small animals. Do not use near open flame. Do not operate machinery after clicking.

Coulda been worse. I'd head that Michael Moore was threatening to do this if the recall campaign got serious.

(via The Sideshow)

"David Nelson, You Have A Call from Mr. bin Laden ..."

I wrote about this a while back. We have a "no fly" list; people who aren't allowed on airplanes for any reason. We also have a much longer list of people who are allowed to fly only after an absurd amount of hassle. Supposedly, this is "for security reasons", but nobody will say who's on the list or why. There's no way to get off of it. It's an observational fact, however, that some people get hassled beyond any point of sense.

David Nelson, for example. Which "David Nelson"? After all, "David" and "Nelson" are both common names. Why, all of them, of course. If your name is David Nelson, you must be a Bad Guy. What kind of Bad Guy? Can't tell you, but we sure can't let you on an airplane without harassing you.

If your name is David Nelson, I'd seriously recommend checking into some good fake ID. It's completely legal unless you intend to commit fraud or tax evasion with it.

I see this stuff and remember "The Lottery", by Shirley Jackson. We have to have a show. Somebody has to be selected at random and torn apart for no other reason than to show the Power of the State.

Brrrr.

Good Theater

The rescue of PFC Jessica Lynch from a hospital in Nassiriya was definitely the cinematic high point of the war in Iraq. It had all the elements of a Hollywood war action movie - troops moving in under heavy fire to rescue a comrade who had gone down fighting, a brave native risking his life to gather intelligence information. Good stuff.

According to the Guardian, it had something else in common with a Hollywood action movie.

It was staged. There was no opposition. The guns were firing blanks. Doctors and patients were carefully kept out of the way.

This story has gotten no play in the US media (one squib in the Seattle Post-Intellegencer, and I rather suspect this is as far as it will go. The BBC is supposed to air this story on Sunday; we'll see what happens.

So now we see the future. No matter how bad the real situation gets, our beloved Government will have cheerful, staged, media events to keep our minds off of our troubles. Scary thing is, this will probably work. To most people, what they see on the Toob is more real than their own lives, and we seem to have a collective attention span of about two weeks. The war in Iraq is already Old News; nobody's interested in it any more.

(Link via Atrios)

LATER - Turns out this is old news. The Toronto Star published essentially the same story on 5 May.

STILL LATER – Older news! Here's an article from the London Times that's more than a month old.

So What Are They Doing?

You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.

-- Talleyrand

Let's see. We didn't stop the looting of the Baghdad Archaelogical Museum or the National Library. Yeah, the damage seems to be a lot less than we thought. Excellent news, but still no excuse.. We didn't protect hospitals, banks, or Government or Ba'ath Party records. We didn't secure known nuclear materials, which have disappeared. Our WMD teams are going home. Iraqi civilians are rooting through the latest batch of mass graves looking for family members instead of waiting for forensic help that would give much better results. Looting proceeds apace; many Iraqis are afraid to leave their homes. The "shoot to kill" order is an admission of failure. In these situations, you always shoot the wrong people.

So what are we doing in Iraq? We have, what, 150,000 troops "in theatre"?

Well, my guess is that the combat troops are doing patrols looking for an army, the maintenence guys are doing maintenence, the logistics guys are schlepping supplies around for the rest of the military. The brass is holding meetings.

In short, just what they've been trained to do. They have no training with "nation building" whatever the <bleep> that means. They have no training as cops. Very few of them speak any Arabic at all.

We base our operations on "war games". When the "game" is over, everybody goes home and writes their "after action report". Well, we've achieved our objective. Our training says that, when the exercise is over, it's over. No more need be done. We have no training for dealing with an occupation.

The "occupation" seems to have no planning at all behind it. Except, perhaps, "Move Chalabi into Iraq. He'll do what's necessary."

It's too early to call this a "quagmire". What we have here is a mess. If we don't find the handle on this soon (and I see no signs of this), we will have a quagmire on our hands.

Stuff I Read

Note the new "Stuff I Read" block over on the right, replacing the "war info" links.

The original Useless Web Pages were inspired by some guy posting a listing of his CD collection as a Web page. This seems to be the classic "Who cares?" item. My "Stuff" list is probably in this category, but what the heck, it's my blog. I read 'em, but they're not in the category of "things that I think that you should read".

Of course, I reserve the right to move them around, add or delete items, and move them in and out of the "must read" block at whim. I will try to keep them current; far too many folks' "blogrolls" never get maintained and are full of dead links and blogs that haven't been updated for years.

Anyway, here they are. Enjoy. Or ignore. Your call.

Looking in the Right Place

Seems like we've been looking in the wrong place for Saddam's <echo_chamber>Weapons of Mass Destruction</echo_chamber>.

Guys, this is the Twenty First Century. Internet Era. Global Economy. Get with it! Digging around through caves is absolutely nineteenth century.

Billmon has the scoop.

Note that Billmon's Whiskey Bar has been added to the list over on the right of Blogs That You Should Read. He has a mixture of humor and analysis like I try to do, but he does it better.